The Australian Film, Radio and Television (AFTRS) will soon offer courses in both game design and virtual worlds, according to Kotaku.

The game design graduate diploma will allow students to move beyond coding and artistics and into ‘creative leadership, understanding game mechanics, and prototyping your concepts.’ The virtual world graduate diploma program will teach students “the skills and understandings necessary for constructing computer generated story worlds for use in a broad range of media industries.”

For avid and/or obsessive Second Life users, this might be a good chance to turn your scripting and creative skills into a broader skill set (that is, if you can afford to spend 2 semesters Down Under.) The list of skills to be learned is impressive:

- Creating a range of pre-visualisations of both real and fantasy spaces
- Exploring the strong links between real set design and virtual world design from a production and cinematographic perspective
- Using a wide range of environmental design tools, off-the shelf virtual worlds and the various advanced techniques required for high-end production
- Exploring spaces and tools designed particularly for multiplayer quest-based game play
- Creative worlds designed for low end browser-based social interaction through to 3D immersive social virtual worlds
- Finding stories and locations in game engines and creating a wide range of Machinima

The courses come out of the 2005 initiative at the school called the Laboratory for Advanced Media Production, which began a focus on interactive and new media.